Wednesday, November 14, 2012

This Day in History: Nov 14, 1970: Plane crash devastates Marshall University

On November 14, 1970, a
chartered jet carrying most of the Marshall University football team
clips a stand of trees and crashes into a hillside just two miles from
the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia.
The team was returning from that day’s game, a 17-14 loss to East
Carolina University. Thirty-seven Marshall football players were aboard
the plane, along with the team’s coach, its doctors, the university
athletic director and 25 team boosters--some of Huntington, West
Virginia’s most prominent citizens--who had traveled to North Carolina
to cheer on the Thundering Herd. "The whole fabric," a citizen of
Huntington wrote later, "the whole heart of the town was aboard."

The
crash was just the most tragic in a string of unfortunate events that
had befallen the Marshall football team since about 1960. The university
stadium, which hadn’t been renovated since before World War II,
was condemned in 1962. From the last game of the 1966 season to midway
through the 1969 season, the team hadn’t won any games. Making matters
worse, the NCAA had suspended Marshall for more than 100 recruiting
violations. (The Mid-American Conference had expelled the team for the
same reason.) But Marshall seemed to be getting back on track: It had
fired the dishonest coaches, built a new Astroturf field and started
winning games again. The Thundering Herd had lost a squeaker to East
Carolina on the 14th, and was looking forward to a promising season the
next year.

For
Huntington, the plane crash was "like the Kennedy assassination," one
citizen remembers. "Everybody knows where they were and what they were
doing when they heard the news." The town immediately went into
mourning. Shops and government offices closed; businesses on the town’s
main street draped their windows in black bunting. The university held a
memorial service in the stadium the next day and cancelled Monday’s
classes. There were so many funerals that they had to be spread out over
several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players
whose remains couldn’t be identified were buried together in Spring Hill
Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their university.

Marshall got a new football coach--Jack Lengyel, from the College of Wooster in Ohio--and
set about rebuilding the team. The NCAA gave the Thundering Herd
special permission to let freshmen play on the varsity squad, and
Lengyel cobbled together a ragtag group of first-years, walk-ons and the
nine veteran players who hadn’t been on the plane that night. The team
lost its first game of the 1971 season but--with a last-second touchdown
that seemed almost too good to be true--defeated Ohio’s Xavier
University 15-13 in its first home game since the crash. The Herd won
one other game that season, and nine in Lengyel’s four-year tenure at
Marshall, but none was as emotional as the first.